Come back to the two and dime, Jimmy Dean

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I mention in this week's column that James Dean, who studied piano with Schoenberg's pupil Leonard Rosenman, took an interest in Schoenberg's music. Dean liked to tell a famous anecdote involving Jascha Heifetz and the Violin Concerto. As it happens, Sanford Roth shot a series of photographs of Dean as he was telling the story. Here we seem to see Heifetz complaining that he would need to grow an extra finger to master the work. Schoenberg's legendary reply: “I can wait.”